Bellringer: Homework Review

10 minutes

Allow students about one minute to share homework answers from the previous night (questions six, seven, and eight in Break Even activity). After one minute, if you used Edmodo for students to share thinking during the previous evening then bring up Edmodo on your projector screen and review some of the discussion from the night before. As a suggestion, students who used the website appropriately do not want to hear you read aloud all the responses they already read last night. Go in the night before and award a badge (teachers can award certain posts with preset badges or with custom badges that show up on student accounts. Badges are awarded for excellent work or any other reason you want to create and assign a badge. Students like to see that they have earned a reward) to any response that was particularly good and worth of further discussion during class. Use these posts as the catalyst for further discussion as a class to review work on the three homework problems.

Possible Hook (if time allows) - Use one of the provided Youtube links to show a short NFL hard tackles video. None of these are gruesome where anyone get seriously injured. Then quickly discuss the importance of a good helmet to player safety. If you have football players in your class you could even ask them how often does the team order new helmets?

Share with students that the same ideas developed during the activity yesterday will still be applied today as we begin to look at pricing football helmets. We are looking for the best deal on helmets when we do what the school requires by bidding out the order (you will probably need to explain what it means to bid an order). You are extending this thinking about expressions and setting expressions equivalent to find the point where the prices are equal (break even). Pass out the activity and allow students one minute to read the first scenario on their own and then ask a student to summarize what the scenario is telling you about the two companies. Allow students about 10 minutes to work through questions one through four in cooperative groups. As student work, move about the room assessing student entry points into the work and providing feedback that moves their learning forward. As you notice multiple methods of answering the questions ask students to present one particular idea during the mini wrap-up session. If you have multiple approaches to the problems - great! Ask students from each approach to present and then have the class discuss the merit of each approach (only select correct approaches not incorrect thinking). Hold a mini-wrap up over the first four questions at the end of about 10 minutes. Using the cooperative groups and mini wrap-up sessions effectively requires students to analyze the merit of other students' ideas and therefore apply math practice standard three.

Allow students 10-15 minutes to complete questions five through 10 within cooperative groups. Again move about the room to assess and provide feedback. Once most groups have finished, hold another student-lead mini wrap-up session. It is your goal today to complete questions one through 10. If you have time to discuss questions five through 10 in a mini-wrap up then wrap this section as a whole group. If the wrap up with shorten the fifteen minutes students have to complete the pre-lesson assessment at the end of class today, then wait and discuss the the wrap up tomorrow.

Clarifying and Sharing Learning Intentions and Criteria for Success.mov

Homework

You will probably not have time to answer question 11 during class because it takes time to properly set up and create a line graph. At this point in the year, I would not assign the graph for homework as students have not had enough practice correctly labeling and setting up intervals for me to trust them on their own. I have had too many frustrated students erasing and needing new copies after an hour of incorrect graphing at home for me to assign this type of work for homework yet. Instead, I would assign the homework page, questions 14 - 16, with cheer uniforms for homework instead. The homework page is closely related to questions one through 10.

Pre-Lesson Assessment (formative assessment lesson)

15 minutes

End the lesson today with the pre-assessment for the up coming formative assessment lesson (Classroom Challenge). Using the link to the lesson website find the complete lesson PDF under resources as the bottom of the webpage. Print the PDF and copy the pre-assessment on pages S-1 and S-2 for each student. The pre-assessment is to be completed alone and preferably in ink pen. Teacher instructions for administering the pre-lesson assessment are located in the PDF packet on page T-2 of the teacher guide.

Solving Linear Equations in One Variable Formative Assessment Lesson

Preparing for Formative Assessment Lesson

If you have never used a formative assessment lesson (classroom challenge) from the Mathematics Assessment Project then you really need to begin some extensive planning now. These lessons are wonderful and I try to use at least one in every unit because they are so effective at uncovering student misconceptions and then helping me to modify instruction to address those misconceptions. I put a time of five minutes on this section but that is misleading. The time spent on this section will be outside of class and could add up to two or three hours of preparation.

When you click on the lesson link you will see a page full of very valuable information on how to use these lessons. These lessons are very effective when you are very prepared and they are very ineffective when you are trying to "wing-it." If you scroll to the Resources section of the webpage (bottom of the page) you will find a PDF labeled as complete lesson. You will need to print this PDF as it is your teacher resource guide for using the lesson and the student materials you will need to copy and use for the lesson. You need to read all the materials provided. This lesson requires one set of cards for the collaborative activity, which you will begin in roughly two days. This means you need to be copying and cutting cards before you begin the activity. I use parent volunteers, aids, office staff, and when desperate students to help cut cards and manage the prep time required. For this particular activity, students could cut their own cards on the first day they begin the activity, but pre-cutting is better. The card set to be copied (one set for every group) is located on page S-3. I usually paper clip each sheet of cards together and place all clipped sets into a large manila envelop.

Also completed prior to the activity is the pre-assessment. When you gather the pre-assessments from today, you have about two days in which to review student answers before beginning the activity. In those two days, you will review the work looking for two things: common student misconceptions in order to generate some guiding questions and to group students homogeneously. When misconceptions surface, and they will, your plan is to find the common group level misconceptions and write some guiding questions that will help students to think about their understanding. This may sound like a difficult task but if you look at page T-3 of the lesson plan PDF you will find common student misconceptions that research has proven often occur with this lesson and then some suggested guiding questions. You can use this page to help you get started.

You want to create about four to five class level guiding questions that will be used throughout the activity. You also want to begin grouping students for the card match activity. I recommend grouping students homogeneously. When looking through the pre-assessments (Do not grade these and begin to mark questions wrong or right!!!!! Only assess them for misconceptions - ink pens down!) Pair students together who seem to struggle with the same concepts. You want students to work productively and at the same pace through the card activity. You do not want one student to carry the other but instead for them to work to learn together. If I have students who struggled to complete any questions correctly then I might choose to make these students into a group of three instead of a pair so there will be more support during the activity and these groups are where I focus the majority of my time and feedback. Begin tonight to look over pre-assessments and group students for the activity ahead.